In my first month in Intel's Data Center Group (too many years ago to tell), a man who would later become Intel's CTO grabbed a whiteboard marker and told me the story of his team creating ASCI Red -- the world's first Teraflops supercomputer. I was inspired as he spoke of the challenges to doing something that no one had done before; build such a powerful supercomputer, and do it with Intel inside. I realized then that one of the best things about working at Intel is having access to so many people whose innovations impact the way the world works.

A few years later, Chip Chat was born, and we started sharing these awesome conversations with the world. Through these conversations, the master architects and scientists associated with generations of processors described how Intel's microarchitectures address performance efficiency on parallel with pure performance. We've talked to futurists like Genevieve Bell and Brian Johnson about what it's like to get engineers to care about how people use their computing devices today and how they'll want to use them tomorrow. We've shared countless conversations with industry executives as they described their companies' unique contributions to the computing arena from green computing to the cloud. We've even had a chance to talk to the next generation of scientists through our interviews of the winners of the Intel Science Award (who frankly impress me above all others.)

All of this chatting has been fantastic and as the host of Chip Chat, I'm honored to have spoken with so many esteemed technology leaders and to share those conversations with the wealth of listeners our program enjoys.

This is why choosing a guest for the 200th episode proved to be a difficult task. The team debated a number of tech "celebrities" (Dilbert was a candidate until it was pointed out that he was, well, a two dimensional cartoon). But, no one seemed to be a great fit. And then I thought back to my conversation with Justin Rattner (yep, that CTO) years ago. In hindsight, I thought about what it meant to stand at the cusp of that innovation. For example, the breakthroughs in science that wouldn't have been possible without the move from Tera to Peta scale computing (with Exascale on the horizon). The fundamental economics of scientific discovery were profoundly impacted by the widespread availability of compute analysis to a breadth of researchers that was unimagined at the time of ASCI Red.

This is why my choice for guest for our 200th episode was Diane Bryant, Vice President of the Data Center and Connected Systems group at Intel. As massive innovation was beginning to shake the foundations of how companies use computing to manage their businesses, Diane took on that role earlier this year to lead Intel's data center innovation.

Given her prior role as Intel's CIO where, among other things, she led Intel into the broad use of cloud computing, Diane is uniquely qualified for this role. Diane and her organization are working on countless product innovations that will shake up computing just like ASCI Red did all those years ago and honestly, I wanted to find out what her biggest inspirations are. When you realize how Intel's efforts on cloud, big data analytics, and the next generation of HPC insight are all under her purview, you can see why there are plenty of things to be excited about. I hope you find her answers as interesting as I did - check out the episode.

Allyson Klein is the Director of Leadership Marketing within Intel's Data Center and Connected Systems Group. She is the host of Intel's Chip Chat and Digital Nibbles podcast programs and shares her insights on technology innovation @techallyson.

The above insights were provided to InformationWeek by Intel Corporation as part of a sponsored content program. The information and opinions expressed in this content are those of Intel Corporation and its partners and not InformationWeek or its parent, UBM TechWeb.

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